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A Motherboard That Doesn't Require An OS
An anonymous reader submits a link to this review of "motherboard that allows access to your multimedia devices via a special BIOS. No operating system required! Good for a home entertainment PC I guess." The review says that it will come bundled with a TV tuner card, too.
At what point does a bios become an operating system in and of itself. Seems like all the features this thing has will require more than just basic input/output.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
Just when I overclock mine, they cancel Martha Stewart.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Isn't an operating system a program that allows you to control your devices? This still does that, its just all contained in the ROM. Pretty neat, but still an OS. Surely not as bloated as MS media center. (note: I haven't actually tried media center, I'm just guessing)
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
This will cause the death of linux. I mean what's better than a free OS? NO OS!
This Tom's HW Article talks about the MSI MiniPC that does the same thing.
Makes me wish I'd held off on buying my Shuttle.
Show me an OS that doesn't require a motherboard, then I'll be impressed.
Another layer of complexity! And for what? So the operating system you do install overrides it and uses its own routines to access the hardware.
BIOS = BASIC input output system.
Its just not meant to do more. Blurring the edges like this is just plain silly - a duplication of effort at best. Another thing to go wrong and more complexity where its not needed. Now we have bloatware in the HARDWARE too!!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
But isn't this just a motherboard with its OS embedded in the 'bios'? Sort of one of those things I'd been expecting to see, but always figured it would be ushered in as a DRM requirement. ;-)
Quack, quack.
Bios used to mean, basic input output services. Now I guess it means basically inoperable operating system...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Features in the bios seems a perfect application for the Linux Bios project, which puts the linux kernel on the bios flash. Could a minimalist Linux distribution be made to do similar features (TV cards, ethernet) while still fitting in the bios memory?
Phoenix is attempting to make a transition from a bios to a trusted startup environment. This means that it may be hard to install operating systems that are not signed by Phoenix... for money. Thus, windows, Redhat EL, and other commercial operating systems will continue to work fine. This may make custom Linux installs next to impossible - without modchips. (can anyone say xbox?)
Macintoshes have been able to play Pong in BIOS for years. This is nothing particularly novel.
No operating system required! Good for a home entertainment PC I guess." The review says that it will come bundled with a TV tuner card, too
Hmm, let's see: a computer with a small piece of dedicated software in ROM, a TV tuner card and a monitor? Last I checked, I could get that sort of device, minus the messy VGA and keyboard cables, and with about zero boot time, at K-Mart for about $100, and with a bigger screen too.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Bah. It's Obviously Slashdotted.
So now you have to flash your bios every time a new codec-version is released?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Boy, are you going to get a lot of responses to that question.
No, BIOS stands for "Basic Input/Output System." That's right, Neal Stephenson got it wrong in Snow Crash. BIOS is one of many ways for a computer to organize its input and output devices so that it can be accessed by a proper operating system. I'm sure there are plenty of geeks here who can tell you more about it than me.
Apple and Sun don't use IBM style PC BIOS. They use OpenFirmware. Iduno what the other kids use.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
This link shows Linux on a chip.
So it supports various hardware in the BIOS rather than the OS. But unless it's got the rest of an OS on it, you're either putting some OS on top of it (which can be simpler than other OSes, but the fact is that those OSes have already been written and removing support would be more work) or you can write code on the bare metal.
I'd hate to give up all the things that an OS supports for me, but I suppose that many of them (memory management, processes, libraries, windowing, keyboard, filesystem) aren't necessary on an embedded system. As long as there's a cross-compiler for it and a way to get that stuff on, you may well be able to work with just the BIOS.
Oh, and I tried to RTFA, which would presumably answer my question, but it's slashdotted, so I'm really aiming my question at the embedded software developers out there.
http://www20.tomshardware.com/howto/20040227/index .html
It doesn't say that it includes the TV capability. However, audio functions work without any additional hardware at all out of the box. No HD, Processor, or memory required...
Interesting idea if you really want to save power. I'd rather fork over a few more cents per hour and have the capability to actually do something with the media though at a moments notice.
... this project!
Seriously folks, I don't mean to get embroiled in the issue of semantics, but there are all sorts of devices in which their OS is lightweight enough to reside in ROM. If the boot code never hands control of the system off to a secondary module (loaded from a disk, for example) how is it not the OS?
about 12 years ago when I told people that I wanted to learn Assembler (or Assembly as most people insist), most folks I spoke with declared I was foolish. (which was largely true)
;-)
Now bringing home about twice the bacon those same folks did, writing BIOS code, I just smile.
And as you see, we got the world by the bawls, us BIOS guys!
(seriously though, I think the BIOS is a piece of legacy crap that we need to get rid off... too bad it pays my bills)
It was called "air construction architecture". Back in 8-bit era, I have seen a home made TRS-80 (Video Genie) clone machine, completely built out of components arranged in 3d with glue and wooden sticks and connected by plain LCUA wire, without any board. Of course, it was running NEWDOS-80, TRSDOS, LDOS and CP/M operating systems from 8'' floppy without any problems. This windy design has no problems with heat dissipation from Eastern-Germany made Z-80 CPU clone and Soviet Union made 16kx1 RAM chips anymore, unlike a board version had.
It is even possible on today's platforms, just take some PXA arm processor, wire some flash and ram chips to it, connect some ancient terminal to serial and alas, you have a linux machine.
There you are, staring at me again.
Lets see, it brings up the system from power off, and manages its resources...
That sounds like an OS..
So its in rom.. so what? Most embedded devices are that way...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was using an OS'less motherboard in 1983. My Commodore 64 kicked butt!
The intended audience for this is obviously the living-room entertainment machine sort of application. For instance, rather than have to wait while the OS loads, and then use some software-based UI just to play a CD, you just have to push the on-button, drop in your mp3 or audio CD and it'll automatically start playing within seconds - no having to turn on the TV to check things are ready/you've pushed a button on your remote keyboard at the wrong time etc.
If you want to play standard applications - just boot into your normal OS and fire up your divx player, stepmania etc. If you have replaced your home entertainment CD/mp3/DVD player with this and just want to access one of those functions in a UI that you haven't kludged together, with no OS wait/booting screens etc - no problem.
My only major request would be that it plays xvid/divx encoded avis in the BIOS environment as well - licence issues aside, I can easily foresee this being a great addition to one of those hushpc computers.
Could you imagine what would happen if Microsoft got a hold of this.
Welcome to Windows 2008 BIOS PRO.... You have 78 critical BIOS updates to perform.
To uninstall Internet Explorer: Replace chips 45- 1035 and solder points 20, 40, 30, and 90. (At least you would be able to uninstall it I guess).
When installing Real player: It permanently writes spyware to part of your flash memory and then charges you for it.
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
Here's google's cache of the same page. I know the site isn't completely slashdotted- as it runs fine at some moments, and VERY slow at others. As usual, google's cache is much more reliable.
Considering that QNX has a 1.44MB bootable demo floppy that has:-
1 A live OS
2 A file system (that I think maybe even now has read/write drivers for QNX's 2 file systems & all the FAT derivitives, plus read-only NTFS support)
3 A very elegant colour graphical enviroment/GUI (that beats the crap out of X-Windows & all the layered crudge now normally ontop of it)
4 Networking capabilities (including drivers for common NICs & dial-up modems)
& 5 a web browser (that even I think now supports a ported Shockwave/Flash plugin, if there's a HDD in the system with the required space formated with a supported file system).
Now even though there's obviously a RAM drive thing going on here, there's no reason why moderm BIOSes can't do the same thing, especially considering contemporary flash RAM sizes mean many BIOSes are to a good degree spare space. From what I remember someone posting here on Slashdot, when this or a very similar topic was previously posted (seems like yonks ago now), some PC flash RAM BIOSes are more than half empty, leading to this potential being investigated, simply as a by-product of finding something productive to do with the left over bytes on the BIOS's flash memory.
I really like the concept of a multimedia oriented motherboard.
And, if it wasn't for the fact that I have a modded X-Box that I paid $125 that, for the most part, does all of this except for tv tuning and has the added advantage of playing X-Box games as well. By the time I build this mobo into a case, it's gonna be the same size as an X-Box too...
The review hit the nail on the head, though. If they did the same thing, but made it micro-ATX and threw on on-board wifi, people would jump on it. I know I'm looking for a small multimedia hub for the bedroom. Heck, I don't even want to put a hard drive in it. I just want a shell that will pull stuff off my main PC.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."